Text Size

“The wind has kind of come out of the sails,” said Sarah Binder, an expert on Congress at The Brookings Institution. “From the slow-moving process in the committee and the dismissive comments from Reid, Democrats have kind of lost their enthusiasm for renovating the Tax Code.”

Of course, tax reform is always an uphill battle that never seems winnable until the last minute. And Baucus exudes confidence and optimism.

“There will be a tax reform bill,” Baucus said last week. “There will be.”

He spent Monday touring small businesses in the Philadelphia area with House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, a Republican. The two have ramped up talks in the weeks before lawmakers are set to flee Washington for the August recess.

Baucus has pledged to move an overhaul package through his panel this fall.

But if he wants the bill to go anywhere beyond his committee, it’s clear he’ll have to do some selling to Reid and other Democrats. At the moment, the majority leader hardly seems interested in the type of tax reform Baucus is pursuing.

Reid issued a thinly veiled warning last week that he couldn’t support a reform that doesn’t generate significant levels of revenue. He suggested using the Senate budget, which called for about $1 trillion in new taxes, as a base even though Baucus opposed that measure in large part because of concern about the new revenue target.

“I want Sen. Baucus and Sen. [Orrin] Hatch to go forward on tax reform, but it has to be under the total understanding that this can’t be revenue neutral; it can’t even be close to neutral,” Reid said. “It has to be significant, and a good place to start would be the budget resolution.”

Other key Democrats agree.

“I support the budget we passed, so that’s the framework where we should start,” said Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat who sits on the Finance Committee. “The majority of the members support that.”

But perhaps more telling is Reid’s sense of antipathy toward a tax overhaul — especially one that doesn’t raise gobs of revenue.

He told reporters last week that he didn’t even read the letter Baucus and Hatch, the Finance Committee’s top Republican, sent to senators in June that said they were moving forward with an overhaul from a blank slate, meaning that virtually every tax provision was on the chopping block.